Wednesday, February 28, 2007
§
The best discussion
of torque in poetry
I’ve ever read
§
Linh Dinh
talking with
Barry Schwabsky
§
on Bush’s plan
to bomb Iran
§
§
Try to imagine
the worst possible jury
for a major literary prize
§
Good writers,
flawed humans
(What about Pound, Celine, Rimbaud,
Althusser, Grass?)
§
§
The Greatest Living Author
in the
(& it does mention Tom Raworth!)
§
§
When Bern Porter ran for governor
as a Republican
§
§
“Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers”
§
Censorship continues
to be an issue
§
§
A profile
of
The Erotic Poetry Workshop
for Survivors
of Sexual Abuse
§
More poetry from Gitmo
& this old link
still works
§
§
§
In praise of
Rigoberto González
§
Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven,
Edith Sitwell
&
Mary-Kate Olsen
§
“Creeley fell under the spell of Williams early”
§
Searching for
the quintessential D.C. poet
but
missing the obvious
§
Susan Sontag’s
last book
§
A festschrift for the late May Swenson
every one of whose
own books are now out of print
§
§
Count the clichés
in
”The Fall of Rome”
There are a few less
in “Atlantis”
§
This might explain
The New York Times Book Review
§
The Blame the Reader
theory of literature
§
Talking with
Gay Talese
of the non-fiction life
§
How to write
nanotales
§
The impact of the
Scrotum Hoohah?
Increased sales!
§
“Free Press
Free Art
Free Love”
§
§
Not a big fan
of Mark McGowan
§
Labels: links
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Monday, February 26, 2007
I haven’t always read Elaine Equi’s poetry as enthusiastically as I seem to be doing right now. As is often the case for me with poems that harken back to the aesthetics of the
A bend in the light.
A dross in the drift.
A tilt in the storm.
A gleam in the ditch.
A grace in the gloom.
A kink in the sand.
A spring in the fire.
A lilt in the hand.
A snare in the common.
A hare in the shed.
A mesh in the fury.
A glare in the blurring.
A stretch in the arc.
A pulse in the bark.
A fork in the wave.
A heft in the sway.
It’s not that Equi isn’t doing anything beyond the “A in the B” exoskeleton of each line. The way rhyme changes position in the second, third & fourth stanzas is hardly accidental, especially announced as it in the second with it’s A-B-C-B end rhymes, poetry’s aural equivalent of a fingernail dragged along a blackboard. Even more interesting to my eye is the way the third stanza is the only one in the whole poem to admit two-syllable words, always in the last position in three of its four lines. For me, that’s the sensual moment of this poem, the real reason for reading it more than once.
An even more austere example of the device poem is “Etudes,” one of Equi’s newest pieces:
Autumn is a solitude.
Winter is a fortitude.
Spring is an altitude.
Summer is an attitude.
Summer is a multitude.
Autumn is an aptitude.
Winter is a quaalude.
Spring is a prelude.
Spring is a lassitude.
Summer is a longitude.
Autumn is a gratitude.
Winter is an interlude.
Winter is a beatitude.
Spring is a platitude.
Summer is a verisimilitude.
Autumn is a semi-nude.
The rules here are not difficult to tease out. Within each stanza, the seasons proceed in chronological order and the last season of each stanza must be the first season of the next. This is a minimalism of surface that is unfamiliar, really, in American writing, tho it has some relationship to the work of such postwar German poets as Helmut Heissenbüttel, Ernst Jandl or Eugen Gomringer. My immediate instinct reading this poem is to want to rewrite it, to make the first line Autumn is a nude and to move to the very last line Autumn is a solitude – thus to “complete” the poem with its strongest and “most organic” assertion – and to find some substitute, any substitute, for the jokey use of quaalude. And I might put all the an assertions into the same stanza.
It’s not that I haven’t employed structures that are, in their own way, almost as obsessively parallel as Equi’s – Sunset Debris is simply one question after another, 44 pages worth in the forthcoming UC Press edition of The Age of Huts (compleat); “Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps” deploys nothing but sentence fragments (mostly noun phrases); “Berkeley” is a poem composed of nothing but “I statements,” most of which were appropriated from other authors. But it’s not an accident that “
I am reminded of the way in which Clark Coolidge’s early masterwork, The Maintains, starts off with just this sort of parallelism, each line derived from a dictionary definition, tho presented in a manner that accentuates the prosodic elements more than the poem’s linguistic structures, as such. Or the formal devices Lyn Hejinian uses to structure Writing is an Aid to Memory and My Life. Or, for that matter, Joe Brainard’s I Remember or Eliot Weinberger’s anti-poem, What I Heard About Iraq.
But I’m also reminded, albeit in a very different manner, of all the poems “as book index,” “as table of contents,” “as menu,” all the list poems of any kind that have been written over the past 40 years and just how very few of them really do work, even in the slightest. They are, for the most part, a blot upon the landscape & a tell-tale sign of a weak poet.
One that is neither is Equi’s own “Table of Contents for an Imaginary Book”:
Spree
Monster Gardens
Up Close, Out Back, Down Under
Flying Backward
The Drunken Voluptuary Workers in the Solarium
Dove Sighting
All the Yellow in the World
A Curse I Put on Myself
Three Sides of the Same Coin
Aria
Night Cream
Good Luck With Your Chaos
The Glass Stagecoach
In the Country of Mauve
Parrots and Dictators
Slumming
Walking the Evening Back Home
A Twelve Course Dinner of Regret
The Gap Gatherer
Burning Down the Ocean
Multiple Choice
That is a book I would love to read. Even more important, it’s a poem in which every single line is fascinating, either in and of itself, or through juxtaposition. It doesn’t matter if we think of these as chapter titles, in fact it may work better if we forget that possibility altogether. I don’t think you need the premise that each of these identifies a poem, story or exposition to know that there is quite a bit behind every phrase. It accomplishes this simply through the language at hand.
Where Equi’s use of this sort of parallelism is at its most effective, tho, is in the one instance in Ripple Effect that clearly would not work in the same way if we did not already know that the device poem is one side of Equi’s work, so that we begin to listen for it virtually with the first line. The poem is entitled “Legacy”:
Now X is dead, so Y can be X.
And Z is dead, so A can be Z.
There’s no shame in becoming someone else.
You may be even better at it than they were.
At times Z got in the way of our idea of him.
Before X was X, he was probably somebody else too.
Here the allusion to the parallel device is what gives the opening of the poem its wry humor. This is a poem that can be read so many different ways (for example, read X as “Robert Creeley,” Z as “Louis Zukofsky;” then read it again with X as “Frank O’Hara,” Z as “Ted Berrigan”). Equi is using what we already know about her own writing to set up expectations here that operate precisely in the ways that she diverts or twists them. It’s a brilliant little poem, true & funny & maybe even a little sad all at once.
So ultimately I trust Equi in these poems, tho I might not trust another poet attempting the very same thing, because I think she shows just how these device poems (tho maybe I’d call that last one a false device poem) call up depths one could get to in poetry in no other way. But they force me to struggle with my own discomforts every single time.
Labels: Equi
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Saturday, February 24, 2007
When I was 16 years old and mowing lawns after school around
I stopped reading the Times on a regular basis when they canned that particular edition, tho occasionally I would buy the Sunday Times &, when I taught at UC San Diego for a term in 1982, I picked up the habit again pretty much on a daily basis, since San Diego’s local choices for a paper came to Dreadful and Worse. For awhile, The Washington Post had a weekly edition that recapped its more significant stories with a fairly deep dive into its Sunday books section and I read that, balanced by a steady stream of progressive weeklies or monthlies: In These Times, Mother Jones, the Progressive, The Texas Observer, The American Prospect. I still read the last of these – it was, I found, the most reliable publication in
All of this is a preface to a response to the few readers who have steadily complained when I’ve placed links to The New York Times in particular amidst the various items of news and notes that I sometimes run here. When The New York Times came online on a regular basis, I resumed my daily perusal of its articles, and for all of the paper’s many faults – which could warrant a lengthy blognote all its own – it continues to be the best English-language newspaper in the world. When The Times went to a subscription basis online, I had no hesitation about signing up. It’s one of two papers to which I pay subscriptions for online access, the other being The Wall Street Journal, a paper I will stop reading the minute I retire from the day job. But The Times is for life, even if I should forever make fun of the fact that it doesn’t need to have comics because it already has its startlingly dreadful Sunday Book Review section, craven little toy of advertisers that that supplement happens to be. It really doesn’t matter that Thomas Friedman only thinks he’s an expert on foreign affairs or that David Brooks is mostly a buffoon – even tho he’s officially declared my little niche of Chester County (from whence Brooks came) to be “Paradise” – if you missed Ayub Nuri’s op-ed piece Friday before last on internalizing the Iraq war you missed a wonderful, if terribly sad, piece of writing. And an important one. It really is the paper of record, for all of its sins.
An annual subscription to the New York Times online runs me $49.95 per year and gives me significant access to the Times archives as well. If I want to read any one of the 80 articles that mentioned Ezra Pound prior to 1930, I can do so. My subscription comes with the right to download 100 such articles each month. Thus I can come across an unsigned piece from
You may care to know that a young American poet, Mr. Ezra Pound, is in this coronation London season in pleasant favor with the “intellectuals” of Mayfair and Belgravia.
$49.95 per year compares with the $273 I pay annually for the Philadelphia Inquirer to be delivered to my door, the $514.80 that New Yorkers pay for daily delivery of the paper hardcopy (which does, by the way, include online access) or the $644.80 it would cost me to have the Times delivered to this Chester County, Pennsylvania address. Most newspapers today still come for free online, something I do expect to change over the next five years. Would I pay for the Inky, as we locals call our rag, online? Maybe not, or if I did it would be because I was dropping the hard copy. Of the other papers I read online more or less on a daily basis – the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, the Guardian of London (formerly Manchester) – only the Post has a shot of getting my money if it starts to charge for online access.
This is not because I really need to know that an anonymous Times writer once thought, in a somewhat condescending fashion, that Ezra Pound had not written any suitable “coronation verse” to mark the ascension of George V, but rather because I choose – as I have always chosen – to engage with the world at large, a process for which the Times is one – among many – useful tool.
I have concluded that any reasonable person who can afford internet access plus maybe 3 CDs (or two nights out at the movies with a friend or partner) per year can afford the Times online. So I am not going to note when I link to a piece in the Times with a little “subscription required” addendum or whatever. If you link to a site you cannot access, you ought to register that irritation internally at least. It’s not a distinction I would make with the Wall Street Journal – I don’t run links to its articles¹ – and I admit that I too find myself irked by those moments of access when I find myself cut off from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Economist or the counter-intuitively named Project Muse. I subscribed to the Chronicle when I was a college administrator, and would do so again if I worked in a school. And I find the idea of keeping intellectual discussion of contemporary (or other) literature behind lock & key at Project Muse all too clear a reason why debunking the idea that refereed journals and academic protocol have anything to do with poetry or poetics is a valid, even important project.
Would it be ideal if all content on the web were free? Yes, but it would be ideal too if all bookstores carried every book of poetry that is in print (maybe 40,000 titles in all), and if all poets had equal access to book publication. When that day comes, I’ll be the first in line singing The Internationale. But until then, it’s the real world I’m going to engage with, and I suggest you do too.
¹ There were articles in the WSJ over the past two weeks about the debate within Fisk University over whether to sell two paintings by Georgia O’Keefe & Marsden Hartley, a profile of the scholar who stands "at the summit of Auden scholarship" and a fun piece by Sharon Begley on baseball sabremetrics and received “wisdom.”
Labels: newspapers
Friday, February 23, 2007
Ray Winstone & Leonardo Di Caprio
Try and look at The Departed, Martin Scorsese’s masterful crime drama that’s up for the Best Picture Oscar this year – and which just might really be the best picture nominated – from the perspective of Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak, the directors of Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong-based thriller on which Scorsese’s
What surprised me most when I finally got to see The Departed this past week was its tautness – compared with Infernal Affairs, it’s a master class on how pacing, editing & the presence of the right score (Scorsese’s with its almost gentle Rolling Stones undertones is by Lord of the Rings veteran Howard Shore) are what make a film tight, not length. The film also showcases the best acting Jack Nicholson has done in at least a decade & the best Leonardo Di Caprio has done since, say, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (for which Di Caprio rightfully was nominated for an Oscar). Di Caprio comes across as a completely different human being in this film, something Matt Damon couldn’t do if his life depended on it (Damon’s a decent enough thespian, tho with limited range), and something Nicholson hasn’t tried since Five Easy Pieces. The one Oscar nod for acting to come out of this film, for Mark Wahlberg’s good cop with a bad mouth, is bizarre given the degree to which Di Caprio & Nicholson offer master classes here. Marky Mark hardly has more to do in this film than his brother Robert, who plays an FBI agent. Also excellent in smaller roles are Vera Farmiga, as the police psychologist who always falls for the wrong guys, and British actor Ray Winstone, as one of Nicholson’s goons, Mr. French.
The plot of the two movies is identical. Street kid gets noticed by local mob boss & sent to the police academy in order to give the boss a pair of ears on the inside; second police cadet gets picked for a deep undercover assignment & accordingly gets drummed out of the academy, given a rap sheet, and told to fend for himself as he infiltrates the mob boss’ organization. At which point both the undercover cop and the “rat” inside the police department spend much time trying to figure out just who the other one is, while also not getting caught themselves. The architecture of the plot, originally written by Siu with Felix Chong, is marvelously crafted & dazzlingly complex. It’s certainly conceivable that I found Scorsese’s telling “cleaner” because I’d already seen Infernal Affairs, but I don’t really think so. One of the layers of difficulty that Scorsese has added is the physical similarities of Di Caprio and Damon, which could (and I think this is intentional on the director’s part) confuse even fans of the two, especially during the first half hour of the film. That’s not in the
Scorsese has been one of
Indeed, there are very few scenes in Internal Affairs that are notably better than The Departed. The first (and perhaps most important) is the scene on the roof where the two protagonists finally confront one another – it’s a scene that, in Infernal Affairs, owes more to movies like Die Hard and Dirty Harry than it does to Scorsese, and Scorsese downplays the vista right where Infernal Affairs made it a major part of the scene. A second, perhaps for the same reasons, is the fall of the police official who has been running the undercover operation inside the gang. There is also an important difference in the set up to the funeral scene, as to just who decided to recommend the deceased for honors. Scorsese’s solution underscores the sliminess of a key character, where Infernal Affairs accentuated the role of the romance. I actually prefer Scorsese’s approach here, tho I think you could make an argument for either one.
The Departed is a more complex, more compelling film than either
Labels: Film
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Tom Devaney
on
Charles Bernstein
§
A remembrance
of Emmett Williams
& an interview
with same
§
§
Book sales are steady
but not in bookstores
§
§
§
“It’s been a long time
since I met
a young fanatic
for Pound or Zukofsky”
§
§
George Lewis
on the
Association for the Advancement
of Creative Musicians
§
A portrait
of John Ash
§
A portrait
of Rodney Jones
§
The Longfellow
bicentennial
gathers a little steam
§
Langdon Hammer
on
Paul Muldoon
§
Pinsky in Qatar
§
Viggo the poet,
Viggo the photographer
§
Spalding Gray’s
last work
§
Reading Frost
as a rugged individualist
§
Friedrich Nietzsche,
American idol
§
Tennessee Williams,
drama queen
§
James Michener,
writer or philanthropist
§
A conference on
the late Yemeni poet
Hussein Abu Baker Al-Mehdar
§
The center of the art world –
Liverpool
§
§
When around paintings,
think $$$
I mean, seriously
§
But ICA Boston
has its way
with CultureGrrl
§
Dia begins to fill
some holes
§
§
Corporate funding
for the arts
declines
§
O Alberta!
§
A new ABCs
for the arts
§
The scandal
o’er
”scrotum”
§
The case of the
plagiarized pianist
§
As languages dwindle
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
You would think that living in
Perhaps it’s the way in which Equi is capable of making complex philosophical observations & arguments in a manner that appears so offhand you don’t realize their depths until well after the hard stop of the final period. Viz “Men in Camisoles”:
All writing is a form
of transvestism.
Men in camisoles.
Women drinking port
and smoking thin cigars.
Think of Flaubert, Proust,
Mallarmé in drag.
Or a woman (any woman)
trying on a man’s power:
”Now I clothe myself
in your blood, your wars.”
Like getting dressed
in a warm room
on a cold day
the sly smile
of the self
as it goes to sleep.
Everything contained within.
You read Rilke
and you become Rilke.
Nothing can stop this
endless, transformative
flow of selves
into other, opposite,
even objects and animals.
In a dream I took my
blue pentagram shirt
to the cleaners
and they said
it would take
three whole months
to get the werewolf out!
Writing seriously without seeming serious is almost the archetypal
Throwing a ball
like a bridge
over an old wound
like a cape
thrown chivalrously
over incoherent muck.
Catching it
is easy.
”Now toss it back,”
says the Zen monk
standing in his garden
centuries away.
like a bridge / over an old wound is a marvelous metaphor precisely because of the way the “wrong” phrase recasts the figure/ground relationship of the metaphoric structure. Nor is it an accident that the only four-syllable words in this poem both occur in the next stanza, as tho the author were having to struggle to get the poem back in control, something accomplished so decisively with the arrival of the word muck. Which term also sets up the terminal k sounds for the lines ending with back and monk, this last very nearly a pure rhyme.
With roughly 250 pages of poetry, Ripple Effect is a rich, fat book, with an unusual organizational structure: first the new work, then selections from each of her four previous Coffee House books in chronological order, then finally a shorter selection of poems from her “pre-Coffee House” days, mostly I take it the early & mid 1980s. It’s an order that discounts the hidden narrative of any selected poems, that of the poet’s progress. In fact, Equi’s early work and her most recent writings can sound so similar that it can be hard to tell the difference. Consider “To Do,” dedicated to Joe Brainard:
Never finish everything
on your to do list.
It will look as if you have nothing
better to do.
And “Then I Became the Weathergirl”:
The air is full of secrets.
Just by breathing,
you become my accomplice.
I’m not going to tell you which predates the other by perhaps 20 years – you’re going to have to buy Ripple Effect when it’s published to find out – but it’s worth noting here that the vision in these two works of what a poem is and can be, the importance of concision, the valuing of wit, have been consistent with Elaine Equi since day one. It’s great to have this big collection in hand all at once.
Labels: Equi
Monday, February 19, 2007
I’m obviously a sucker for Mongolian movies. One of my favorite films ever is Urga, which was distributed in the
Genghis Blues is the 1999 documentary of a San Francisco street musician, the late Paul Peña, who manages not only to learn Tuvan throat singing, the deep music in which the singer literally sings two notes at once, but gets invited to Tuva, the Russian province immediately north of Mongolia, for a bi-annual throat-singing festival & contest, where he actually wins an award. To make this improbable but true story even stranger, a key figure in all of this is the late physicist Richard Feynman, who as one of the world’s leading scientists parlayed a childhood interest in stamps – he had one from Tuva back during the brief period when it was an independent nation prior to Soviet consolidation of its indigenous peoples that showed a race between hot air balloons and camels – into an exploration of a country that had disappeared. His foundation to this day sponsors cultural exchange activities between the
Lü cao di is a 2005 film by the Chinese director Ning Hao that tells the tale of three boys, roughly age 7, who live with a nomadic group which is starting to show signs of setting down roots, building yurts out of brick & attempting (with no success) to construct a windmill.
The three boys, Bilike, Dawa & Erguotou, discover a ping pong ball floating down the little spaghetti-thin curlicue of a river that runs by their clan’s settlement. Although these erstwhile nomads are far more modernized and westernized than the group in Urga – they have TV, t-shirts, Dawa wears a baseball cap while Erguotou zooms around the steppes on a small scooter, plus there are bottles & jars visible in the background in their yurts – the boys have no clue what this round object might be. Much prodding, holding it up against the light of the sky and licking it convinces them that it can’t be an egg, so that it must be a glowing pearl. They consult with a local lama, but since he’s only ten, he doesn’t have much more in the way of worldly experience. Later, the trio learn almost by accident that it is a ping pong ball – they don’t know what that means exactly & their informant says simply that it’s the “national game” – which leaves them with a further mystery. They have, they believe, “the national ball,” which they deduce must be a treasure. So it must be returned.
Interestingly, given that
There are other plots surrounding this central tale – the father’s attempt to modernize their living quarters (his mother’s complaint about the brick yurt is that it’s “square and uncomfortable”), an oldest daughter’s desire to join an ethnic dancing troupe that would require her to move to the unnamed city (it appears to be far too small to be
Two things for me really made this film fascinating. First is just watching how much this version of nomadic life had modernized from the Russian portrayal of 14 years earlier – one can sense the slow encroachment of globalization at the deepest level of people’s lives, such as the sister’s application of lipstick for her audition with the troupe.
The other was the photography by Du Jie. This is the most static motion picture I have ever seen – the camera, with surprisingly few exceptions, takes a position and if the action wanders off-screen, it doesn’t move to follow it. Scenes at night are shot with no illumination. Often the characters are at a middle distance with the panorama of the Mongolian steppes or grass fields & barren tundra of the
All three of these motion pictures are filmed by outsiders – tho there has been Mongolian cinema since the 1930s, the one true Mongolian-made film I’ve ever seen is The Story of the Weeping Camel – and it’s easy to see both in Urga and Lü cao di a wish to portray Mongolians as some variant of “noble savages.” But what separates both of these films from simply racist fare like The Gods Must Be Crazy is that the confrontation with the modern world, which in some form or other sets the action going in each, is framed precisely in terms of what impacts the outer world is having on the nomadic group. The clan isn’t running away from technology – it’s Bilike’s father who wants someone to build him his dream of a windmill – but it’s skeptical in what it appropriates. When they stop getting decent reception from their TV, it has less value than two goats.
¹ Urga literally is the original name of the Mongolian capital
² This is consistent with thinking of ping pong as the “national” game, which it may be in China, while the most popular sport in Mongolia proper is wrestling.
Labels: Film
Sunday, February 18, 2007
THE GRAND PIANO, PART 2
An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980, by Barrett Watten, Ted Pearson, Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Kit Robinson, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, and Bob Perelman.
Since the 1970s no literary group has made a more articulate contribution to thinking and practicing its groupness than the Language writers. Rejecting the vertical organization of the Poundian or Bretonian circle – with its singular genius issuing directives from its center – they instead developed a horizontal structure in which new terms, tones, and intertexts (and new versions of the group's history itself) can emerge from, and be engaged by, any member.
— Lytle Shaw
THE GRAND PIANO is an on-going experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language Poetry in
Parts 1 and 2 are $12.95 each or $20.00 for both. Serial publication began in November 2006; subsequent volumes to appear at three-month intervals. Subscription to the entire series of ten volumes is now available for $90 directly from Lyn Hejinian,
Designed and published by Barrett Watten, Mode A/This Press (
Labels: Grand Piano
Saturday, February 17, 2007
A terrific anthology
of contemporary poetry
from
edited by Shin Yu Pai
7 poets
each with an interview,
& the poems
include a couple of sound files
and a video
realization
of Chen Li’s
War Symphony
§
The rest of
Fascicle 3
is no slouch either
with an Eritrean portfolio
including translations from
Tigrinya, Tigre & Arabic
poetry from over 50 poets,
new work by Alexei Parshchikov
(gotta wonder about that
translation strategy
tho),
whole chapbooks
by Allyssa Wolf
&
Vicente Huidobro,
work by Harry Crosby
plus an essay on Crosby
by D.H. Lawrence,
plus
Roberto Tejada on Clayton Eshleman,
Kevin Killian on George Oppen
Graham Foust on Looking
Mark Wallace on P. Inman
& oodles more
§
Also up online
with a ton of reviews
is the latest
Galatea Resurrects,
a magazine
done entirely in Blogger
§
Noisiest home page
for a new mag
goes to
Mad Hatters’ Review
Where Joe Amato
has some new poetry
&
Lynda Schor
offers an interview
& a “whatnot”
with tips on diapering
§
Artie Gold
one of
Vehicule poets
& a fine, fine fellow
died Wednesday
§
A praise day
in memory of
Diane Burns
§
§
What I like best
about this review
of the history of poets
at Harvard
is that the author
can’t spell
Charles Olson
§
Looking at the Booker
from the vantage
of
§
Vaclav Havel
in
§
Rodney Jones
wins
$100K poetry prize
§
§
Trying to forget
the dreariness of Auden
"in his cups"
in order to celebrate
the centennial
§
O Anna
Akhmatova!
§
The blindness
of Borges
§
Greg Tate
on
Bob Dylan
as the future of rap
§
§
Viggo, reading
§
If you thought Dan Brown
was dreadful,
wait till you read
the Dan Brown Wannabes
§
§
Fluffing your aura
to make it
even more real
§
The problems of conserving
contemporary painting
§
§
§
And if,
on March 2nd,
you should find yourself
in
at the AWP,
check this out:
Labels: anthologies, Journals, links, Passings, Readings
Friday, February 16, 2007
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Written between 1919 & 1921, & published in 1927 in a Russian émigré journal, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s short novel We insured that he would never again be permitted to publish inside of Joe Stalin’s Soviet state. The one-time naval engineer, who at one point had supervised the construction of Soviet icebreakers in British shipyards, and who may have chosen the names of his characters – D-503, I-330, S-4711 – from the specifications for the ship Saint Alexander Nevsky, creates a simple-enough fable of a dystopian future that would serve as a model for both Brave New World and 1984. Persuaded by the presence of a Bruce Sterling introduction, I picked up the Natasha Randall translation because I was looking for something short to read during a month when I had two long business trips before starting what I expect will be the novel that will take up my fiction reading for the rest of this year, Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. Even though We has a significant pedigree – “the best single work of science fiction yet written” says Ursula K. Le Guin on the book’s front cover – I was surprised by just how much I liked this book.
Partly this is because of the ways in which Zamyatin, born the same year as H.D. & just a year younger than Pound, foretells elements of the future, such as the creation of the Berlin Wall, decades in advance. Partly it’s because this is a passionate tale that falls outside of genre boundaries, even tho it is now routinely treated – viz. Le Guin – as part of the history of sci-fi. The story line really is the Garden of Eden inverted. After centuries of war, the civilization known here as The One State is, in fact, a city walled off from the external world, run by a dictatorial Benefactor as a technocratic and rationalist utopia. Families & religion are abolished, people literally live in glass apartment buildings and must request permission to lower their blinds for pre-assigned sexual liaisons, which are scheduled in advance by ticket (one senses that nobody would ever think to say No). D-503 is the master builder of the Integral, the city state’s projected entry into space travel and as committed a bureaucrat as you could imagine. All of this goes to hell (more or less literally) when D-503 finds himself falling in love with one of his sexual partners, I-330, who is something of a terrorist, determined to Tear Down This Wall.
The sexual frankness & sometimes daft combinations of retro-industrialism & futurama reads like a scramble of genres and some of the details – such as indicating just how far into the future this is by periodically noting the presence of gills on all the main characters even if the most advanced communications technology appears to be radio or the vague descriptions of “aeros,” the individual flying systems some (tho not all) of the characters appear to have access to – actually gives the book some of the rough feel one gets, say, from a Philip K. Dick book, where the futuristic elaboration of detail (think Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke) just isn’t a value.
It’s worth noting the degree, tho, to which, even as early as 1921 – when Lenin is still alive & nine years before Mayakovsky will commit suicide – Zamyatin grasps the problems of the totalitarian state. Inhabitants of the
Zamyatin didn’t fare a whole lot better than his character. Perpetually in trouble with the authorities (both before & after the Bolsheviks took control), he finally emigrated to France where he co-wrote the screenplay for Jean Renoir’s version of The Lower Depths, but mostly scraped by in poverty before dying of a heart attack at the age of 53. Wikipedia notes that he’s buried on Rue du Stalingrad in Thiais, south of
Randall’s translation is quite good, tho occasionally she picks a contemporary idiom that sounds out of place for a book written in 1921, albeit set centuries, if not millennia, in the future. Part of what makes this works, I think, is Randall’s own training not as a poet but as a physicist, not that removed from the concerns either of the engineer Zamyatin or those of his protagonist, the rocket scientist. This is, in its own way, a very left-brain cry for the joys of the irrational, the spontaneous, the truly committed. If you have any interest in the history of science fiction, this is a precursor you are certain one day to read & Randall’s edition is well suited to its task.
Labels: science fiction
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Eric von Schmidt
one of the best
of the ‘60s folkies
has died
(2nd Row, 3rd Right
remains one of the great
albums of that decade)
§
Moneyball
and
Poetry
§
A view of the Nigerian poetry scene
§
John Ashbery
”at his best”
§
§
in Austin
§
Before there was Neal & Jack,
there was Sam & Bill
§
Marcel & James
just said no
§
But did Bill
know Fletcher?
§
Bidding
for Kim Addonizio’s
thong
§
Interviewing Steve Swallow
about
Robert Creeley
§
An interview with
Neil Gaiman
§
Talking with
Nate Mackey
§
Quoting
Louis Menand
§
Talking with
Nikki Giovanni
§
The Independent Press Association
has folded
§
Modernism
comes to the Corcoran
§
New music
and the blogosphere
§
The ontology of
Second Life
§
Writers in
have no choice
but to be
public intellectuals
§
“the voice of
British Asian poetry”
§
Why are there no
great Braille poets?
§
The best selling book
in
won’t be published
until July
§
turns on the radio
§
Jonathan Mayhew
gives
good snowclone
§
§
Amanda Nadelberg
on
Lisa Lubasch
§
The last hurrah
of the Berkeley Renaissance
§
§
§
Free the Ulysses Two!
§
§
Edwin Morgan at 86
§
Look at this article in its
”printable view”
and the example
doesn’t look like
”condensed language”
in the slightest,
just a pleonast’s
sloppy prose
§
“Poetry
should be as well written
as prose”
(Rebecca Brown
quoting Pound)
§
Why theme-based
anthologies
are a joke
§
The battle over aesthetics
sends in the clowns
§
Yes,
conservatives
really are like that
§
For example,
Al Alvarez
§
The book as new tech,
ja?
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
When ROVA: Orkestrova’s Electric Ascension started last Saturday night at Philadelphia’s International House, the audience hadn’t even stopped chatting amongst themselves. Maybe it was the way in which turntablist Marina Rosenfeld’s first manipulations of her dub plates – digitally prerecorded electronic music pressed into large acetates, not unlike the old “masters” for LPs or 78s, which Rosenfeld then handles much the way hip-hop DJs do commercial records – echoed the effects of an orchestra warming up. Gradually the rest of the semicircular arc of musicians join in – Wilco guitarist Nels Cline; Andrew Cyrille, veteran of more than 100 CDs with everyone from Dave Burrell to Anthony Braxton, on drums; bass guitar maestro Trevor Dunn, a one-time member of Mr. Bungle; violinists Carla Kihlstedt and Jenny Scheinman; and Andrea Parkins on a giant white electric accordion as well as laptop electronics. The volumes & complexities build.
Finally, the ROVA portion of the “Orkestrova” kicks in as Larry Ochs, Bruce Ackley, John Raskin & Steve Adams of the ROVA saxophone quartet come in. By now, the 400-seat theater is utterly filled with a solid wall of sound. The only time I’ve ever heard anything like it in my life was a Paul Butterfield Concert at UC Berkeley, circa 1965, where the
Electric Ascension is an arrangement of John Coltrane’s 1965 masterwork, Ascension, in which Coltrane attempted – whether he succeeded or not has been a point of contention for over 40 years – to create a form for intense improvisation within the big band form. ‘Trane also used 11 musicians: five saxophone players (himself, Archie Shepp & Pharoah Sanders on tenor sax, Marion Brown & John Tchicai on alto), two trumpets (Freddie Hubbard, Dewey Johnson), McCoy Tyner on piano, two bass players (Art Davis & Jimmy Garrison), and Elvin Jones on drums. Coltrane’s version – he recorded it twice & actually switched versions midway through the original release of the LP – runs roughly 40 minutes.
In 1995, ROVA and the late Glenn Spearman teamed up to form the “5 sax” core of a recreation of Ascension, with Dave Douglas & Raphe Malik on trumpets, George Cremaschi and Lisle Ellis on bass, Don Robinson on drums, with Chris Brown on piano. While this version was faithful to the instrumentation of Coltrane’s original, it has – at least in the ears of the two ROVA members with whom I discussed this over cheese cake in a student bar after the concert – something of a “historical re-enactors” feel to it.
So in 2003, ROVA set out to do it again, but with a new arrangement that incorporates the latest trends in contemporary music ensembles. In the version that was recorded by KFJC & released as the Electric Ascension CD, Robinson is still on drums & Chris Brown is still involved, now on electronics. The string section – Kihlstedt & Scheinman – is the same as played at I-House on Saturday. And you will find Nels Cline still on guitar. On the recorded version, however, Fred Frith handles the bass, Otomo Yoshilhide the turntables & Ikue Mori operates the drum machines in lieu of an accordion. The CD is superb, but you will need great speakers and a lot of volume to get even a remote sense of what we heard at I-House.
This is where the question of live vs. recorded music, especially in a genre with a lot of improvisation, becomes especially acute. Two of the musicians on Saturday – Rosenfeld on turn tables & Cyrille on drums – were tackling the composition for the very first time. Others have been there for each of its nine or ten performances to date. In any event, the transformation into a new arrangement with new instruments removes any impulse toward literal recreation: the most you get are the reiteration of certain key themes, particularly at the beginning & end. As the piece evolves – there are a remarkable number of potential combinations to consider, tho the final project is actually spare in terms of the number it deploys – some remarkable moments & explorations occur – the high point Saturday (for me at least) was the violin duet between Kihlstedt & Scheinman, who’ve collaborated on more than a few projects together since they first met at Oberlin – it was both a collaboration &, it felt, a contest almost in the rap challenge or “doing the dozens” sense.
My program has notes scribbled over it describing my sense of the feeling of the overall project during the course of the 60-plus minutes that the Orkestrova takes to work its way through Coltrane’s 40-minute map: wall → ocean → forest → cathedral. Each, it occurs to me in retrospect, represents a stage of increasing involvement & differentiation, from the impenetrability of the initial wall through the dive into to the overallness of the ocean to some individuation of details (literally the trees within the forest) to, finally, a resonant & remarkably symmetrical sense of architectural form.
The was the first time in the non-quite-twelve years that I’ve lived in Philadelphia that ROVA has played here, and it occurred to me that one of the things I miss most about not living in the Bay Area is not being able to hear this group two or three times each year. There are early sections of The Alphabet, Blue in particular, that were written almost entirely either at live jazz events in San Francisco (especially the large free jam sessions at Pangaea on Bernal Heights that often would involve two or three members of ROVA’s original lineup, plus others such as John Gruntfest). Although the expansion of distribution, from houses like the Jazz Loft or the Downtown Music Gallery (which is just up the street from the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan), has improved greatly in recent years, Saturday’s event reminded me no amount of CDs or downloadable MP3s can replace the three-dimension experience of literally being in the music at a live performance, especially one that has as many ideas, as densely & intensely packed, as this one. So here’s to the Ars Nova Workshop, who sponsored the ROVA Orkestrova last Saturday, and which has been a fabulous addition to our local music ecology. Mark Christman, the secret sauce of the Ars Nova project, has been doing a great job. Thank you, Mark!
Monday, February 12, 2007
I know that some people are going to cringe to hear this note’s topic sentence, so let’s just be blunt about it. We can come back and address the collateral damage after:
Fifty years from now, when people are writing without irony of “the classics of flarf,” one of the works that will turn up on that relatively short list will be Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson.
The book has just been released by Zasterle Press, so recently in fact that it doesn’t yet show up either on the Zasterle website, nor that of Small Press Distribution, where eventually you will be able to buy it.
The idea that flarf, which Gary Sullivan once characterized as
A quality of intentional or unintentional "flarfiness." A kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. "Not okay."
should have “classics” is, by itself, problematic. The whole notion of a “classic” “awfulness” ought to be oxymoronic even if one were to associate it with the somewhat older notions of kitsch or camp. But when I think of kitsch, say, I think of some social institution on the order of the Lawrence Welk Show, the 1950s TV bandleader whose sense of the polka drained the music of its ethnic heritage, substituting a treacly version of super-Americanism. Flarf, by its character, goes against that grain, raising its forms to the level of conscious while, in most cases, both loving & attacking them at the same time.
Magee’s choice of Emily Dickinson is a case in point. Magee notes in his forward that he seeks to
disrupt some of the pieties around Emily Dickinson’s work that I don’t believe have served her poems very well. (As an example, I would note the rarely mentioned fact that Emily Dickinson is one of the funniest poets ever.)
Whitman & Dickinson share an outsider’s perspective on what was already a submissive & imitative Anglophiliac literary establishment by the end of the Civil War, but where, when the descendants of that establishment claim Whitman for their own today, they simply look like fools, Dickinson’s own social isolation permitted her work to be mediated by that same establishment. That she is, grammatically at least, the most disruptive & fragmentary poet of the 19th century – Blake, Lautréamont & Rimbaud have nothing on her – has often been smoothed over by School of Quietude “heirs,”¹ at least until Susan Howe reclaimed the poet in all her rawness. It’s not an accident that Magee’s title points directly at Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, nor that he acknowledges her by name in his foreword.
Magee’s description of his methodology deserves to be noted:
The poems in this book were written during an intensive period of reading and writing in 2003 and 2004. I was curious as to whether I could, using some of Emily Dickinson’s forms, evoke in my own readership that combination of shock, bewilderment, excitement, pleasure (a process of dis-orientation and re-orientation) that I imagined Dickinson’s earliest readers must have felt when reading her work. I was cognizant of the fact that
In picking Angie rather than, say, Emily Dickinson, “a sort of Zelig figure in American popular culture,” Magee is picking not only the former lover of Frank Sinatra & actress in over 130 films & TV shows, but also a creature as self-made in her own way as was the poet. Angeline Brown –
I had a hunch that searching her name would throw up an unending stream of interesting Googled material. Whatever voices emerged from this procedure were, to my mind, pure “flarf”….
Here, just to test this, is “087”:
To Die For — an idea — is Rather
Vegas to Flea
Let’s not — Devolve into Conjecture —
Sea-change on me.
The president hasn’t “Entered the Image” —
Achilles assumed when hid,
Himself among Women Puzzling questions
An old Yearning with His dad —
Jon Bon Jovi is
Classic deadbeat showing
Up — occasionally —
In Order — to beat — up His mother
Version — “to fully” —
This is where it gets interesting. Magee’s poems replicate the start-stop stutter step movement central to
As a project, My Angie Dickinson also rubs up against the notorious vessel model of communications, the linguistic equivalent of intelligent design. In this telling, poems functionally are molds into which content is then poured. But as with the poem above, what results constantly refutes the theory itself. The materiality of these snatches – “’too fully’” indeed – push back with as much resistance as Vegas or Flea.Throughout, one catches Magee’s own deft hand & sense of wit, as with “082”:
An “added” — Pleasure —
Tinsel Girl remembered —
Feathers
His “menacing peril” —
The overall result is not that far away from something like Charles Bernstein’s Nude Formalism: brilliant, hilarious, deeply conceived, completely serious, with more twists than a pretzel factory, well written, but still thoroughly flarf. Just for good measure, My Angie Dickinson is also the most ambitious production, design wise, Zasterle has yet attempted. This book is a joy.
¹ To the degree that one poet I know used to claim you could read all of her poems aloud to the tune of The Yellow Rose of
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Linh Dinh & Frank Sherlock on the streets of
One of the lessons I think anyone learned who came into the orbit of the late Gil Ott is that, outside of the writing itself, virtually all of the other tasks of the poetry are identical to those of community organizing. That’s something that Gil taught primarily through example, but its impact on the next generation of poets in Philadelphia has been profound, which in turn has not only had a lot to do with the renaissance of poetry here, but even, I daresay, the kinds of poetry being written & associated with the region.
One of the writers who clearly has learned this lesson well is Frank Sherlock, longtime host of the reading series at La Tazza, whose day job until recently had been working with a nonprofit to ensure that kids in Philadelphia schools get healthy food to eat rather than just high fructose corporate profit margins. Awhile back, Frank took some time off to go down to
Our good friend Frank Sherlock was rushed to the hospital January 22nd with a sudden and mysterious illness which turned out to be a serious case of meningitis. He needed emergency surgery, and also suffered a heart attack and kidney failure as a result of symptoms related to the illness.
The timing could not be worse as this attack of meningitis happened during the two month window in which Frank is without health insurance.
His friends have come together to help raise money at this critical time. We are reaching out to other friends and the poetry community on Frank's behalf. Please consider sending donations for his hospital bills, physical therapy, as well as his very expensive medications and other needs.
Thanks to the generosity of Juliana Spahr you can now send checks for the Frank Sherlock EMERGENCY FUND which will be tax deductible!
'A 'A ARTS
c/o J. Spahr
5000 MacArthur Blvd.
CHECKS SHOULD BE MADE OUT TO "'A 'A ARTS"
and these checks will be tax deductible.
PLEASE MAKE A NOTE THAT YOUR CHECK IS FOR FRANK SHERLOCK.
Thanks so much! Your donations are very much appreciated!
Labels: Poets-in-need
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Jasper Johns
talking with
John Yau
about artists, O’Hara,
Sitwell & UFOs
§
Digital text is different
§
Why tags
are like poetry
(talking with Tom Mandel)
§
This week’s
“death-of-indie-bookstores”
article
cites this blog
right down to Curtis
in the comments stream
§
Tom King
made the 1,000,000th
visit here
§
The first review
of David Shapiro’s
Selected Poems
§
A portrait of
Steve Clay
of
Granary Books
§
Talking with
Michael Gizzi
§
This time
it’s not a net hoax:
Bush is trying
to gut funding
for NPR & PBS
§
The Brutalists
&
the Offbeat
§
“Racism as criticism”
at the
National Book Critics Circle
§
Time to read
§
Not for sale
§
Wordsworth, Coleridge
& somehow
Van Morrison
§
An oddball piece
on Zbignew Herbert
§
Paul Muldoon
”being in the moment”
§
Anne Fairbairn,
connecting Arab poetry
to Australian lit
Thursday, February 08, 2007
David Melnick and I were riding a BART train that seemed far more tattered & worn than I had remembered them, the screech of the under-the-bay-tunnel making it difficult to hear one another, while David thumbed through his newly acquired copy of Rae Armantrout’s Next Life. “She’s still true to the same values,” David said. “She loves those words with short vowels. All those as and ifs.”
I knew what David meant. We had just come from hearing Rae read with Leslie Scalapino, a superb performance on both their parts. Leslie had read from a couple of books, one of them being (I think) Day Ocean State of Star’s Night, forthcoming from Green Integer Press, another being ‘Can’t’is ‘Night’ and other poems, not a book but a CD from stemrecordings.com. I had heard in Leslie’s reading something I’d not considered before with regard to her writing, its affinity for the work of Larry Eigner. In Eigner’s work you are never very far – seldom more than a word or a few syllables – from the immediate. One reads – or at least I read (and my hearing Scalapino again reminded me why I think
this) – her work with a similar sense of the phenomenological present. Sentences often change direction or angle off in ways not anticipated, certainly by the syntax, but because decisions & priorities must be made in the now which is constantly shifting, always in question. There is an urgency to the work that I find I trust completely and am willing to let her go further than almost any other writer before I insist on some sense of return (not the same thing as “making sense,” for the record).
And I’d heard the short vowels in Armantrout’s poems to which Melnick had been alluding. It’s an aspect of her writing I associate, to be honest, with George Oppen, who similarly preferred those vowels and knew it. (I know that I’ve told the story more than once of standing next to Robert Duncan at a reading at Glide Church when Mark Linenthal brought Oppen up to introduce him to Duncan. This shocked me at the time because, being but a callow lad, I thought surely all the famous poets knew one another. Oppen’s first remark to
I turned to my copy of Next Life and read “Some,” a poem that, in fact, Armantrout had not read at Moe’s, just listening for the vowels:
Someone insists on forming sentences
on my pillow
when all I want is sleep:
marching orders,
wisecracks about others elsewhere.
I’d like to kill her
but I’m told it’s she
who must go on
at all cost.
*
The old cat casts her eye
about the carpet near her,
jerkily,
preparing to lick herself.
*
A sense of mission lost
in ink’s
jagged outcrops.
I try to tell myself
what I must have known
before
in a form
I wouldn’t recognize at first.
*
Blinksmanship.
Bright ranks of
of
slip rapidly
over bars of it.
Blank-pedaling.
Long live illumined
oblongs
with this shuttling
cross-hatch
I don’t know if a linguistic atlas would identify the rate of long-to-short vowels generally and, if so, just how far a poem like the above might deviate from the norm, whether it be nationally, from Armantrout’s lifelong
It’s not that Armantrout doesn’t use long vowels here, so much as it is that she uses them to set up effects that land more directly on the short ones. Thus, for example, the two long syllables in old and eye in the second section (reiterated by the shorter version of a long vowel at the end of jerkily) aurally set up the last line: preparing to lick herself. Indeed, the key word of the last line, lick, can be found inverted as the second syllable of jerkily, whose k sound has already been set up by cat, cast and carpet. The way Armantrout sets up these minute effects is a pleasure to watch.
Similarly the long vowels of Bright ranks set up not just the double of / of, but are part of the gradual build-up for the brilliant final sentence, whose lone long vowel is the ē in –ing. That’s a wonderful sentence to read aloud: Long live illumined / oblongs etc.
Obviously, Armantrout is no sound poet – she consistently uses it to reinforce arguments, to suggest ironies, to set a sense of tonal color. But it’s always an active dimension of the work, part of the great pleasure in reading (and in hearing her read) her poetry.
Labels: Armantrout
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Unveiling / Marianne Moore, the latest chapbook from Michael Cross’ Atticus/Finch Press consists of two movements from a larger work by the Cumberland Valley poet, John Taggart. Taggart, whom I’ve been reading since he was what you might call a student poet out of the University of Chicago (he would go on to get his Ph.D. at Syracuse), is somebody I never would have thought to have called a Cumberland Valley poet before his last book Pastorelles. As a young poet, Taggart was one of the first in his generation to really base his practice on his reading of the Objectivist poets, especially that of Louis Zukofsky & George Oppen. But where others might have been interested in the work of these poets for their political allegiances, or in Zukofsky for his work on the materiality of the signifier, the thingyness of his language as Stephen Colbert might put it, Taggart’s interest appears more to have been in the careers of these two poets as a philosophical or critical project.
It was, at least as I read it, that philosophical dimension that proved to be a bridge from these early books to the works for which Taggart is most widely known, Slow Song for Mark Rothko and a series of works that invoke the musicians Thelonius Monk & John Coltrane. Marked by a use of reiteration that reminded some readers of Steve Reich or Terry Riley, and which others took as a call for poetry as ecstasy or transcendence, it’s worth noting that Taggart has not only used his influences as conscious, even revered models, but that he has always chosen those whose practice can be read (or seen or listened to) as among the most philosophic in their genre’s recent history. Indeed, that musicians like Monk & Coltrane demonstrated how one could think in their music is precisely what someone like Wynton Marsalis objects to in their work. And when one hears that “the trouble” with Zukofsky is that he is so willing to be difficult, it’s largely the same complaint. So it’s intriguing, if not
absolutely scandalous, that somebody like John Taggart can come along and demonstrate the arc of emotion that lurks in the work of these artists.
Taggart’s current piece, at least from the portions visible here, continues these inclinations, organizing Unveiling / Marianne Moore around three historic figures: Moore, who was herself briefly a Cumberland Valley poet during the years when she taught at the Carlisle Indian School prior to heading to New York, 18th century Philadelphia naturalist William Bartram &, geographically the outlier here, Marilyn Monroe. Seeing in Monroe not simply an echo of Moore’s own name, but also an antithesis in their conceptions of the feminine, yet even deeper an echo of their self-willed approach to the world, neither of them really capable of being copied as such (tho with Monroe at least there have been nearly an infinite number of attempts). These elements commingle, section to section:
8
“Curious men”
18th century common
name for botanists naturalists horticulturalists all the attentive students of nature
9
The truth is naked
the truer truth is the A after B truth the figurative/the body
after finally/at last without
a stitch.
10
A new name a true name unpublished not
in the books
nomen nudum a naked name
But the structure of this chapbook opens up many more questions than it answers. The two movements represent sections 1 – 27 and 73 -87. What comes between? Does it end with 87 or, as I hope, go onward? How do the elements of Chinese cultural history, which are sprinkled throughout, come to relate finally to the trio of major figures spelled out here (and, in fact, are the three all there are? What about Alexander Wilson, Bartram’s student, who just peeks in here toward the end?
As always with Atticus/Finch books, the production values here are simply gorgeous. In the image above, you can just make out the “Skinny tree sparsely branched’ impressed in the palest gray ink into the pale green cover, the image itself taken from the first line of this work that proclaims it is “lacking / a felicitous phrase to begin.” But as so often happens with chapbooks taken from much larger projects, as grand as it is – and this is one of the nicest books Taggart has ever had – it leaves you hungry for more, maybe not answers to the mysteries here so much, but at least the full suite which promises to be grand.
Labels: Taggart
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
One poem in Next Life that strikes me as revealing a good deal about how Rae Armantrout weaves her verbal magic is called “Close”:
1.
As if a single scream
gave birth
to whole families
of traits
such as “flavor,” “color,”
“spin”
and this tendency to cling.
2
Dry, white frazzle
in a blue vase –
beautiful –
a frozen swarm
of incommensurate wishes.
3
Slow, blue, stiff
are forms
of crowd behavior,
mass hysteria.
Come close.
The crowd is made of
little gods
and there is still
no heaven
Formally, the first two sections are built up out of incomplete sentences, the first a dependent clause, the second a complex noun phrase, while the third section entails three short sentences. The second of these three sentences consists of just two words addressing the reader, and is the one from which Armantrout has claimed her title, so that the title functions as a kind of caption, highlighting just this moment in the text.
The first section is almost archetypal Armantrout, invoking as it does her favorite social form, the family, suggesting at one point the violence of childbirth, at a second the ontological status of categories &, finally, a deep emotion that may (or may not) signal dysfunctionality. The “As if” sets the entire section atilt, so that we don’t read “gave birth” for what in some ways it is, the true verb phrase of all that follows. Armantrout pulls back on this verb, I think, precisely to foreground what follows.
One might read the second section as the simplest of metaphors – Armantrout avoids using the word flowers at the end of the first line, replacing it with a quality very much in keeping with the ones that appeared in quotation marks in the previous sections. Then she offers this same sense of the qualitative again, this time in a more conventional (and, here, italicized) mode: beautiful. The final couplet appears again to offer us the same image without actually deploying the noun flowers. Note the three stages of her depiction – the first suggests motion while stopping it, the second implies plurality &, not coincidentally suggests bees so as to reinforce the image of what is not said, but the last line brings in – as had the last line of the first section – emotion & specifically emotion that has somehow gone beyond. The parallelism of the first two sections, these incomplete sentences ending in periods, is nearly as important as what is being said.
The third section’s first sentence could be read – in fact, it would be hard not to – as tho it also were a depiction of flowers and/or a roster of “traits.” The idea that such traits represent crowd behavior takes us back not only to the frozen swarm of the previous section, but to the whole families of the first. Characterizing them as mass hysteria again calls up the scream of the first section, the incommensurate emotion of the second. All of this thus far is built, for all purposes, around a single image of flowers in a vase. No wonder then that Armantrout wants us to look closely.
So that the final pair of couplets, the last complete sentence (albeit the first one to close with no period) offers us that which is incommensurate, that these are, flower by flower (child by child) little gods born into a universe in which there is still / no heaven.
If, as a reader, you aren’t paying close attention, a poem like this goes down so easily & lightly. But if, instead, you read it three, four, ten times, the depths, the cohesion, the themes & their underlying starkness will exhaust you.
This is a story that Armantrout explores over & over. On the page immediately prior to “Close” is a simpler version, entitled “Blur”:
I’m called home
but don’t go.
I have enough past
and future
to accompany me now.
The solitary one
interferes with itself.
They should give up
counting.
Four simple sentences divided across five stanzas. That third stanza, lone line, would in fact function as a kind of formal hinge if only Armantrout hadn’t pushed that last one-word line in the final couplet out to the right (which I suspect is why she did that). The first two sentences start with “I,” but the last two turn in different directions. The third would appear to talk about the narrator in the third-person. The fourth, tho, uses the most mysterious of words here, They, reminding us that someone or something in the first line of poem must have been doing the calling, but without us ever know just who it might be.
At one level, I think it’s easy to read this as a poem about death, about accepting the limits of one’s life, but at another level it appears to be about obligation, perhaps family responsibility, and the resistance that is the self, that may in fact be what defines the self. That at least is how I read what I take to be the key word in this poem, interferes. It’s a wonderful choice of words, suggesting exactly the push-pull dynamic that I think Armantrout is after.
But what then do we make of the title “Blur.” It’s not a caption like “Close” but suggests something else, perhaps that very push-pull dynamic or possibly even the figure implied by They. It’s a title that I relate – and this may be my own projection here – to the cover image of Next Life, a photograph by Albert von Schrenk-Notzing of “The medium Eva C. with a materialization on her head and a luminous apparition between her hands, 17 May 1912.” The materialization looks like a little cap, too small for Eva C’s head & at an angle that makes no sense. The apparition looks like an electrified thread, glowing mid-air.
There is, I think, a serious sociological dimension to such off-shoots of random spirituality as the ectoplasm-seeking psychics or the 19th century movement that gathered around, say, forms such as theosophy, aspects of spirituality seeking new modes of expression in an Enlightenment universe. I don’t think that Armantrout is interested in that. But I do think she wants to investigate, in almost every poem here, the role of spirituality in a world that is no longer god-infested, tho without particularly investigating all the ways its usual expression, religion, leaves vast swaths of devastation in its wake. It’s not that Armantrout sees no devastation, but for that she usually employs a different
model, that of the family.
Labels: Armantrout
Monday, February 05, 2007
This blog will receive its one millionth visit sometime later this week. I may very well miss it since I’m on the road on a business trip & don’t have regular access to the web. You can find the current number in the Site Meter box on the left column, just below the big Poets in Need button amidst all the link icons that separate out the blog archives from the blogroll.
It has been just short of four and one-half years since I started this project. At the end of the first full year, the blog had received some 50,000 visits, a number that today shows up in less than two months. Obviously, tho, those weren’t 50,000 different visitors any more than last year’s 350,000 visits represented that many distinct individuals. Rather, as best I can tell there is a core readership of maybe 1,500 people, folks who stop by somewhere between daily – a handful more often than that – and once a fortnight. These are people who never need to explore beyond this top page unless they’re working on some project and need to get archival.
Around this core is a somewhat larger number of individuals who stop by for a time – perhaps they’re taking a class & have been told by a professor to check it out – but who don’t develop the habit. These readers tend to look at a number of pages when they visit, but they may not last as readers more than a month or term.
These days, the average number of pages read per visit is fairly high – around 1.8 – suggesting that classes are actively using the site. Toward the end of summer, that number might drop as low as 1.1 or 1.2. Even the latter means that one out of every five readers is going beyond just the top page.
When I started this blog, my goal, as I’ve noted before, was to have maybe 30 readers a day, 30 being the audience size of what I take to be a completely successful reading. And I still think that any blog that gets 30 readers a day deserves to be called successful – indeed, I think you can have a successful blog with considerably less, since the point of the blog is not numbers but rather the quality of thinking that the form helps to bring out in you. But my model was obviously wrong, in that what goes on here is not a public reading – this is not a podcast, tho Didi Menendez has been trying to persuade me that it should be – but actual eye-mind-brain reading, if not exactly the way it’s done with books & hardcopy magazines, then the way it’s evolving online. Right now, my average visitor spends exactly three minutes each time they come by. That’s roughly three times the length it takes to read the words in this note up to here silently, but less perhaps than it would take to read these same words aloud.
What this suggests to me is that the web is more than simply a new distribution medium for the same modes of writing with which we’re all familiar. The idea that Jacket is a magazine is probably a very useful metaphor for its editors, but ultimately that’s what it is – a metaphor. I can’t say what will come next exactly, tho I don’t think flash poetry is it, precisely (tho it might be for concretists & visual poets). In fact, I think we’re about to see several different & somewhat contradictory trends occur simultaneously. One is that blogging has gone from being a new medium to an old one in just five or six years, tho to date nothing has shown up yet that suggests to me anything better. I tend to agree with my son who argues that social networking sites all suck. But that might not be true three to five years from now.
I also think we’re seeing something of a backlash to online content, as such. One history department has already banned the use of Wikipedia as a citable source for papers & there are certain to be others. Similarly, we’re already familiar with the model of the brilliant grad school poet-blogger who suddenly goes silent (or at least dampens down the activity markedly) the instant he or she gets a tenure track job, suggesting that there is a conflict (real or imagined) between community & career. As least such poets are being clear as to which value they’re going to pursue.
Similarly, I think there’s going to be – already is, I suspect – some clashing over whether it’s possible to do serious critical writing in this form. One of the most interesting things about last December’s MLA convention in Philadelphia was listening to one fifteen-minute paper after another & realizing that two-thirds had less in the way of ideas than the average blog note. And this was, by all standards, an excellent MLA convention. Try writing 200 MLA presentations in one year, tho, and your whole idea of what constitutes a critical piece of thinking is going to change. In this sense, the real promise of blogging is the one that it holds for changing what constitutes critical thought, literally marginalizing the academy as a site for such about poetry, returning critical writing instead to the poets themselves, most of whom do not teach, or do so only under the most abject of adjunct circumstances. Perhaps marginalizing is too strong a term – there are, after all, good people in the academy who do serious work – but at least “de-authorizing,” de-legitimating academic critical writing as such, forcing it to compete on an equal basis with the “deep gossip” of poets writing about their own work & that of others. Nothing could be healthier than that.
But mostly I want to say what I’ve said before when I’ve come across these little milestones in the history of this blog, which is thank you for stopping by, whether you agree with anything I write or not, or simply love to watch a train wreck in slow motion.
Labels: blogging
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Frosty, the snow job
(what’s wrong with Irish poetry)
§
Designing book covers
§
“The only people writing
should be those who must write,
I scrawl in a notebook
as I sit on the side of the running bath
while my young son
makes duck noises
at me.”
§
§
Three Palestinian poets
§
The ambiguous William Empson
§
UC sues Derrida’s family
over archive
§
Penguin’s novel novel
is a wiki
Labels: links
Friday, February 02, 2007
There is something about the construction of a book as object that ensures that a 78-page hard-cover volume of poems will appear to be “slender” in ways that a comparable paperback original will not. This makes it possible, I think, to mistake Rae Armantrout’s new book, Next Life, for something more frail, less searing in its intensity, maybe less fierce in its intelligence, than it really is. At least until you open the cover. When you do that, the best analogy may just be an improvised explosive device.
I’ve been reading Rae Armantrout’s poetry now, almost daily as it happens, for close to forty years. I’ve seen most of these poems in various stages of composition as well – Armantrout is perfectly capable of trying 20 different variations on the same two or three lines until she gets one that is, from a reader’s perspective, completely unsettling. At the same time, Armantrout writes the “simplest,” and “most clear” poems of any of the language poets. But consider this, which is in fact titled “Clear”:
An old woman is being led through the parking lot by two girls. They hold her hands and speak in energetic, explanatory bursts while she cranks her head this way and that as if expecting something which has yet to appear.
As if the crystalline clarity of this ocean pool, cradled in two lava arms, meant something which we had been waiting to hear, something indistinguishable from meaning itself, and unchanging, so that, finally, it’s we who turn to go.
How can a poem that is just three sentences, two paragraphs, two images, be at once as clear as the pool cradled in two lava arms and so completely enigmatic? At one level, I read this as tho watching a magic trick. I watch it over & over & still can’t see how the card or the coin or the suddenly released white dove reappears. I think there’s a correlation at some deeply pre-rational level between those two lava arms and the “old woman” that completely transforms the analogy, rendering it simultaneously three-dimensional & entirely mysterious. Because you couldn’t diagram it if you tried.
That mystery, the unnamable, a persistent dread, is a constant in Armantrout’s work, never far from the suburban mall surfaces she renders with greater accuracy than anyone in my generation. Consider, again, the relation of ants to war and – especially! – to mother in this poem just two pages further in. Or, for that matter, televised. It’s entitled, rather in the classic Armantrout manner, “Yonder”:
1
Anything cancels
everything out.
If each point
is a singularity,
thrusting all else
aside for good,
”good” takes the form
of a throng
of empty chairs.
Or it’s ants
swarming a bone.
2
I’m afraid
I don’t love
my mother
who’s dead
though I once –
what does “once” mean? –
did love her.
So who’ll meet me over yonder?
I don’t recognize the place names.
Or I do, but they come
from televised wars.
Now go back and explain the function & meaning of that first couplet. I don’t think that’s possible, not in any easy sense, but it’s essential to the construction of meaning in this poem.
One notices in Next Life a shift in direction in Armantrout’s concerns, which have been fairly consistent going back to her first book, Extremities. The social commentary of the cultural quotidian, the surrealism of the mall and suburban “commercial strips” has almost entirely dropped away. What remains are the sort of short, intense philosophical poems that are the ones that remind some of Armantrout’s readers not of any affinity with language poetry, but with the work of her most direct ancestor, Emily Dickinson. I won’t be surprised if some readers aren’t ambivalent about this new, sharper focus. And I won’t even be shocked if someone doesn’t decide to declare Armantrout to be a spiritual, if not religious, poet either. But I do think it will be impossible for people to read these poems and think of her as a “slight” or even “fun” read – the poems may sometimes look like the work, say, of Robert Creeley or of a more recent writer like Graham Foust, but the intensity of Armantrout’s new poems can be draining on an attentive reader, even when she employs her well-loved sense of humor, as in “Remote”:
The breath coming
to rest
like a small frog
at the bottom of a fish tank,
then darting up to surface
now again,
is mine?
*
Remote and, by now, automated
distress calls fill the air.
*
Do you believe this?
Metaphor
shifts a small weight
there and back.
My self-reflection shames God
into watching
Considering what the possibilities are for an image to attach to that first section (my favorite is the head of the poet plunged into the aquarium, not just because it’s hysterically funny, but also because it reminds me in some perverse way of Adrienne Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck”), the starkness of those last two lines make me want to sit up and say “Whoa!” I want to write that the word self-reflection is the key to this poem, but the use of the word small two lines before seems at least as pivotal, as does in the second section, the term automated. There’s not one wrong word in this poem. Indeed, there may not be one in this entire book.
Labels: Armantrout
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Molly Ivins
1944-2007
When I was the executive editor of The Socialist Review, back betwixt 1986 & 1989, I found myself reading The Texas Observer, a journal with which we traded free subscriptions, just so I could read this one fantastic columnist they had by the name of Molly Ivins. So I was not at all surprised, in the intervening years, as she went on to become famous as a nationally syndicated columnist, her razor-sharp wit, common sense & basic human decency being a killer combination of skills for anyone in her line of work. She tried to warn the nation about the man she dubbed Shrub, and she was right.
Ms. Ivins kept writing right through her three bouts with cancer, tho it cut into her regularity as a columnist & turned her magnificent head of red hair white &, at points, non-existent. Her final column, just three weeks ago, was entitled “Stand Up Against the Surge.” One way to say thank you to Molly for all of her decades of work in our behalf today is to join some one million bloggers and blog readers who will call their U.S. Senators to tell them to stop the escalation & bring our troops home now. Follow this link –
http://pol.moveon.org/virtualmarch
– and the good folks at MoveOn will help with the phone numbers and even show you when the best time to call is &, if you want, send a text message to your cell phone reminding you when that moment has arrived. If anybody asks, tell them Molly sent you.
Labels: Passings
